“All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.”
Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
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Ken Kesey 103
novelist 1935–2001Related quotes

Lines written for River Song, in Forest of the Dead [4.9] (7 June 2008)
Context: When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepts it.

“Why is it nobody understands me and everybody likes me?”
As quoted in New York Times article "The Einstein Theory of Living; At 65 he leads the simplest of lives — and grapples with the most complex thoughts." http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00713FA3A58157A93C0A81788D85F408485F9 (12 March 1944)
Variants:
Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?
As quoted in The Dark Side of Shakespeare : An Elizabethan Courtier, Diplomat, Spymaster, & Epic Hero, p. 126 https://books.google.com/books?id=-5SxGKrTRUEC&pg=PA126 (2003) by W. Ron Hess
Everyone likes me, yet nobody understands me.
As quoted in "The culture of Einstein" at MSNBC (18 March 2005) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7406337/
1940s
“I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.”
Source: A Wrinkle in Time